Backers of Ex-Leader Held in Attack on Shevardnadze

Six days after an assassination attempt against Eduard A. Shevardnadze, president of Georgia since 1992 and Soviet foreign minister during the glasnost of the 1980s, investigators in his native republic announced Sunday that they had arrested “four or five” suspects and were hunting for two others.

Shevardnadze’s motorcade was attacked last Monday night in the heart of his picturesque, red-roofed capital, Tbilisi, by a group of 10 to 15 men armed with guns and grenade launchers. Two of his bodyguards and one of the attackers were killed; the other would-be assassins escaped. The president was unhurt.

The attack caused new turmoil in a region that has largely calmed down after being racked by violent conflict beginning in the early 1990s. Shevardnadze’s first comments afterward--a televised denunciation of what he called “international terrorism”--prompted speculation in Georgia that Russia, the ex-Soviet region’s still-unpopular former ruler, had masterminded the bloodshed in a complex play for the south’s oil and gas wealth.

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On Sunday, Shevardnadze told Russian television that the latest attempt on his life--an earlier one occurred in August 1995--was carried out by Georgian supporters of the country’s first post-Soviet ruler, Zviad Gamsakhurdia. But he also suggested they had been trained outside Georgia, leaving open the possibility of international foul play.

“On the whole, those arrested are local people. They belong to the group of so-called Zviadists,” Shevardnadze told the analytical program “Zerkalo.” “Where the traces lead is hard to say now, but naturally they lead somewhere, not only to the various regions of Georgia but to other countries as well.”

That allegation referred to the confused and bloody recent history of Georgia, a tiny republic of 4 million people just beyond the Caucasus mountains that mark Russia’s southern border.

Gamsakhurdia--a fervent nationalist, former Soviet dissident and onetime translator of Shakespeare into Georgian--became Georgia’s first independence-era president in 1991, at the chaotic end of Soviet rule. His often-expressed fears of KGB surveillance led him to denounce all opponents as agents of Moscow and to arrest many. He was overthrown after a violent coup at the end of the year. In the spring of 1992, Shevardnadze, who had lost his Moscow job as Soviet foreign minister when the superpower collapsed, returned to his mountainous ethnic homeland and took power there instead.

In 1992 and 1993, Gamsakhurdia tried to seize back control of Georgia with armed rebellions from his provincial power base. After failing twice, he returned to a home-in-exile over the border with Russia, in the nearby ethnic region of Chechnya, whose separatist leader was trying to shake off rule by Moscow. He died at the end of 1993 under mysterious circumstances during a rebellion in southwest Georgia, a year before Russia and Chechnya began a 20-month war of their own.

As both Russia and Georgia recover after the end of their wars, the links between nationalist rebel leaders in their two countries in the murky dawn of independence have been blamed for much subsequent instability.

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Chechnya’s most rebellious field commander, Salman Raduyev, a maverick warlord who refuses to accept the authority of today’s postwar Chechen leaders and still pledges allegiance to the dead president of the early 1990s, claimed last week that he had played a part in the Monday attack on Shevardnadze.

Raduyev has been called for questioning by Chechnya’s prosecutor general.

But Shevardnadze was skeptical about this claim. “I do not completely rule this out,” he told “Zerkalo.” “I think that his men might have taken part in this attack--but the very boldness of his statement gives cause for doubt.”

Shevardnadze said Georgian officials were cooperating with Russia to solve the mystery of the latest attack. However, he did not let Russia off the hook altogether. The 70-year-old leader repeated charges that he has broadcast all week--saying Moscow was being disingenuous because it is still refusing to extradite Georgian ex-security chief Igor Giorgadze, whom Shevardnadze blames for the 1995 attack.

“Why does the opinion prevail all over Georgia that this was planned in Moscow?” Shevardnadze asked rhetorically.

“We are talking again about that group of Giorgadze and other Zviadists who found refuge [in Moscow]. That is why grounds appeared to suspect the Moscow authorities.

“We are now working in cooperation with the Russian Interior Ministry. But the fact that Moscow is hiding terrorists casts [a shadow] on our good relations,” he said.